The school exam season begins
On Monday, eighth-graders sat the Romanian language and literature test in the National Evaluation
Ştefan Stoica, 19.06.2023, 14:00
With the start of the school exams, the Romanian education returns to relative normality. This academic year has been rather troubled, with an all-out strike of teaching and non-teaching staff paralysing education for 3 weeks.
The strike ended just in time for the national evaluation of 8-grade graduates and for the high-school Baccalaureate. After intensive negotiations with the government and protests of unprecedented scale in the past 2 decades, public education staff received substantial pay raises and a commitment that the new public sector salary law will recognise the importance of their work. Teachers ended the strike, but warned that a failure to stand by the governments commitments would have serious social and political consequences, given that 2024 is a year of all possible elections, from those for the European Parliament to local, parliamentary and presidential ones.
On the other hand, the Romanian public education sector now relies on 2 legislative pillars, after the endorsement of the new education laws. The 2 pieces of legislation, one concerning undergraduate education and the other university-level education, are claimed to reform the system and bring it closer to present-day requirements.
The undergraduate education law is mainly designed to curb school dropout rates, to fight functional illiteracy and to increase investments in education. In turn, one of the goals of the higher education law is to support European cooperation for Romanian universities.
The laws were endorsed amid trade union protests, giving the Opposition an opportunity to criticise their lack of solutions for the serious problems in the system and to declare the failure of “Educated Romania”-the presidential project that was the starting point for the new legislation.
With the strike settled, the end-of-cycle school exams could be organised as scheduled. On Monday, over 160,000 eighth-grade graduates started the national exam season with their first test, the Romanian language and literature. On Wednesday they will sit the math test, and on Thursday ethnic minority children will have their mother tongue exam.
The high-school admission grade is the arithmetic mean of the grades in the National Evaluation. This is the first year when the grades during the secondary school years are no longer considered in the high school admission process.
This year, because of the strike, enrolments for the National Evaluation and Baccalaureate were extended until 16th June. The high school admission stage ends on the 19th July, when children will find out the high schools where they have been admitted.
The Baccalaureate begins on Monday, 26th June, again with the Romanian language and literature test. (AMP)
